Songwriters—when do you pack it in on a new song?

[jaymarsch]

I completed a song last year that I had been working on for over four years. Before I gave up on it, I asked myself again what is the song about? What gave rise to my first wanting to write it? That made me realize that the song wanted to go somewhere else. Once I realized that, it gave me more permission to slash and burn - I tossed out whole verses and wrote a bridge. The song came together over the next couple of months.

No rules, really but I guess I share all this to say:
Don't be afraid to toss things out and re-write
Don't be afraid of letting the song take off in its own direction
Stay in touch with what your motivation is to write the song in the first place and it may inform you of where to go next.

Best,
Jayne

[Marshall]

Originally Posted by Slothead56

I’m not prolific but I think I’m a pretty good writer (for an amateur).

I’ve been working actively on a new song for almost 14 months trying to get it right. I have the melody, the guitar hook, the narrative, two verses, a chorus and the bridge. I cannot get the middle verse out of me. I know exactly what I want to say and it will not come. It’s not writers block per se, just an inability to get my thoughts on paper. I have three or four variations done and they just don’t cut it.

The song started with a great guitar hook. Wondering if I should abandon ship on this and rework the hook into something else.

When do you give up and move on??

Hhhhhmmm. You've got a lot already. Guitar intro, two verses, a chorus, and a bridge are pretty much all a song needs. Maybe you're over-complicating it. Do you really need that other verse?

I know I worked for months on a song. The bridge was confounding me. The 1st verse is the setup in present time. The second verse is a throw back to an earlier happier time. The 3rd verse is the aftermath. So the bridge had to explain what happened and went wrong. And it was musically worked out nice, but kinda short for the time needed to explain things. For months I would churn and churn options. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and think about it. Finally I got a pretty nice succinct little section that explained things well enough to set up the concluding verse. I've played it for people and explained how much trouble I had with the bridge. People say, it sounds simple and easy and tells them what they want to know.

But it was HELL getting there. The whole thing falls flat on it's face without that bridge. And it took probably 6 months to get it right.

[Pitar]

If I can't write it in a day, maybe two, then I abandon it as a song, keep it on the back burner and shift gears to another song idea. All my songs were written in the span of a couple days and polished over a period of a week or two. Then they matured with age as creativity and progressive skills breathed new life into them.

When in college one of my creative writing course tasks was to write a short story every day in a succession of styles, and one had to be an example of some form of poetry. By that time (I left HS and worked 9 years before going to university) I had pretty much progressed to a point with guitar where all my playing was original works. I borrowed from them to meet class course requirements. And, I had run out of youthful creativity by that time so it prompted me to begin anew as a songwriter. It was tougher, though, because I'd lost much of the muse that had buoyed my writing.